THE Honduras mess is going to heat up, not cool down. Will President Obama keep rooting for the side that rallies to the cry “Yanqui go home”?

Obama threw his lot in with deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who’s seen throughout the region as a stooge of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Indeed, Chavez has already threatened military action to return Zelaya to power.

Zelaya now plans to return to Honduras tomorrow, even though the nation’s military, acting in accord with its Congress and courts, just forced him out of the country on Sunday. “Who is going to protect me? We are the blood of Jesus Christ, as we say,” Zelaya told reporters yesterday.

Does he expect help from Chavez if the army confronts him as soon as he lands back home? “Not now,” Zelaya said, smiling broadly. That implies possible help later — and perhaps as soon as Friday morning.

If Venezuelan forces try to impose Zelaya against the wishes of every other democratic institution in Honduras, will Obama continue supporting him?

Addressing the UN General Assembly yesterday and speaking to reporters afterward, Zelaya compared himself not only to Jesus Christ, but also to Mahatma Gandhi, George Washington and Martin Luther King. Announcing his plan to return to his country tomorrow to resume the role that “the people” chose him for, he broadly attacked the Honduran “power elite” that just exiled him.

He also introduced the entourage that’s to accompany him on tomorrow’s flight from Washington to Tegucigalpa. The top figures are Argentina’s leftist President Christina Kirchner and UN General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann — an old Sandinista hand who’s spent the last year trying to turn the United Nations into an arm of the Nicaraguan-Cuban-Venezuelan axis.

Using language common to caudillos like Chavez, the Castro brothers and Kirchner, Zelaya claimed that 70 percent of Hondurans backed him even before Sunday, and that his support has now only grown. He went on to deny having planned an anti-constitutional referendum to allow himself to serve a new presidential term. All he did was conduct “a number of surveys” about constitutional changes, Zelaya said yesterday. And no, he doesn’t plan to remain in office after his term ends Jan. 27. “I am a farmer. I enjoy planting and sowing seeds,” he said.

But that isn’t what the Honduran Congress or courts believe. They feared that Zelaya would copy Chavez’s feats — seizing excessive powers via constitutional changes. To prevent such a power grab, they used the army to overthrow the president — installing the speaker of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, as interim president, and now they say they’ll arrest Zelaya once he lands in Honduras.

After he was sworn in Sunday, Micheletti called it all an “absolutely legal transition process” and promised that the presidential election will go ahead as planned in November.

But the military’s involvement leads many in Europe and the United States to think “coup.” Zelaya yesterday played to that stereotype, enjoying cheers at the United Nations and announcing that every European Union member had withdrawn its ambassador from Honduras.

But most of all, Zelaya basks in the speedy endorsement he got from the Obama administration. Not only did Obama denounce the “coup,” the deposed Honduran president said, he also demanded that “I would be immediately reinstated.”

Indeed, several reports say the State Department spent weeks pushing the rest of the Honduran government to refrain from deposing Zelaya.

Hmm. Obama very publicly refrained from intervening in an internal Iranian affair earlier this month. Yet, in the more complex Honduran crisis, he resolutely and rapidly took a side — and not our side.